Interview on Reporting Medication Errors This assignment is about interviewing and discussing with a pharmacist methods to report medication errors per facility’s policy and ways to encourage nurses to report medication errors promptly. This was a face-to-face interview with pharmacist BB at work. He is a qualified professional pharmacist and appropriate for this assignment. The interview began with this question: What is a medication error? “A medication error is basically a failure to comply with the hospital medication administration process policies.” What cause medication errors? “Medication errors can be caused by several factors. But the most common one is when the nurse does not scan the patient’s armband to verify his or her identity and administer the medication to the wrong patient.” What can nurses do to prevent this type of incident from …show more content…
This form is submitted to the pharmacy department so the supervisor or manager can follow through. The physician must be notified before submitting the form, there is a section on the form requiring for the time and name of the physician notified.” What are other ways to report medication errors? “Always notify your team leader or supervisor of the incident so it can be reported accordingly. A medication error may cause serious adverse drug events and can be harmful to the patient. Also, it can cost a patient’s life and the hospital thousands of dollars. Therefore, all medication errors must be reported following the appropriate protocol to prevent serious adverse events.” Although there are some consequences to each medication error, it is imperative to report it in order to improve patient care and safety. Medication errors can significantly affect patient safety (Elden & Ismail 2016). Medication errors do not only occur during the administration stage, they can occur from the ordering and down to the provision stage (Radley,
Effective communication is crucial in ensuring that patient care is coordinated and safe. This semester, I witnessed an incident where a patient's medication was missed because the communication between the physician and the nurse was unclear. The nurse assumed that the physician had ordered the medication, but the physician thought the nurse had already given it. This resulted in the patient not receiving the medication on time, which could have led to complications. This experience reinforced the importance of clear and effective communication among healthcare
Deficiencies in communication between health professionals and recommendations for improvement are major findings in many health care quality improvement investigations with communication errors identified as the root cause of 70% of sentinel events in health care setting. Research also indicates that inadequate communication between health professionals and with health care consumers and/or family members is the primary issue in the majority of medication errors, adverse reactions, and near
Fisher Week Three Response to McConnelly Yvonne, your post was extremely intriguing to me as a community health department is not an environment I have had the privilege of experiencing. Interestingly, the utilization of computerized order entry does not prevent the prescriber from ordering an incorrect medication dose or the wrong drug (Lapane, Waring, Dube’, & Schneider, 2011). Do the facility employ process to assure nurses are checking the medication in order to avoid the administration of an incorrect drug or dosage? Distractions have been linked to medication errors, consequently, and the ability to care for a solitary patient at one time clearly minimizes the distractions and interruptions that a nurse may experience during medication
Medication errors can be very dangerous for the ones taking the wrong medicines or doses; therefore, safety measures must be in place. Administering them must be done with an understanding and focus. One missed check could have a staff member giving a resident the wrong set of pills. Some interventions to help prevent the medication error from occurring is to first report errors. When errors are reported, the main cause is to try and never let the error occur again.
It is the pharmacist job to deal with employee errors. Always be alert, if you cannot make out something on a prescription it is important for you to contact the prescriber to make sure that you have the information correct, better to be safe than sorry. Technicians are not authorized to give a consult that is for the pharmacist to complete. It is very important that the pharmacist always sees the prescription before it leaves the store. Drug interactions could be very serious and should never be taken lightly.
Administration and Near-Miss Medication Errors in Nursing Introduction This assignment will be reviewing two peer-reviewed articles. The first article is written by Colleen Claffey and titled, Near-Miss Medication Errors Provide a Wake-Up Call. Lily Thomas titles the second article, Impact of Interruptions, Distractions, and Cognitive Load on Procedure Failures and Medication Administration Errors. Each journal article discusses medication errors within the administrative perspective along with the prescription that was prescribed.
Introduction Nurses are one of the most important people in the healthcare system. They handle just about everything that involves direct client care. They are also in charge of administering medication to clients under the order of the doctor or nurse practitioner. Sadly, the number of incidences involving medication errors are quite high. In this paper, I will talk about the numerous ways medication errors can occur and how nurses have a great role preventing them, in order to keep all clients in the healthcare system safe.
Medication use is potentially dangerous. Polypharmacy is increasing, and makes it harder to keep track of side effects and interactions and of potentially inappropriate drug combinations. “The risk of serious consequences, hospitalization, and death due to medication errors increases with patients’ age and number of medications (Scand J Prim Health Care, 2012)”. For example, the GP is supposed to monitor the patient's regular medication, but does not always do so. Lack of monitoring and keeping track of patients’ medication use is a main cause when a patient is given inappropriate drugs.
A Medication error is defined as any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is under the control of the health care professional, patient, or consume. Therefore, any form of error that arrives within the healthcare system is deemed unacceptable. Now by understanding what a medication error entails, nurses are better able to place emphasis on how to prevent medication errors. It is important to prevent as many errors as possible when administering medications. Hospitals that accommodate high numbers of medication errors receive less funding and support by fellow agencies.
With this case study I will attempt to offer clarification to the issue of medication mistakes being dispensed at HMO pharmacy. The fact that rates of dispensing errors are usually low there are some additional progresses in the pharmacy distribution systems that need some adjustments. Because pharmacies dispense such extraordinary volumes of medications that even a low error rate can render enormous volumes of lawsuits totaling even larger sums of payouts. Research also needs to be done with dispensing errors in out-patient health-care sites in community pharmacies within the USA and Europe.
This resulted in 7% of the respondents reporting involvement in a medication error during that past year. Good interpersonal skills and effective communication ensures that concerns regarding patient safety can be brought up without seemingly challenging the knowledge of the other healthcare
The wide ranges of medications on the market provided have similar names, packaging and possibly come in more than one dose, thus, pharmacists and nurses have to take special care when giving treatment to wards and patients respectively, since these provide higher incidence of medication error. This is why double checking is very important even though sometimes both parties are restrained with time, workload and interruption. Nurses play a key role in the course of medication administration, and therefore they must be active in the avoidance of medication errors (Aiken et al., 2002, Benjamin 2002, cited by MRAYYAN et al., 2007).Although each and every hospital has policies and protocols these may still be violated due to a number of reasons, including interruption, distraction, disruption and many activities to take care of at the same time whilst administering medication. It is never over-emphasized to promote the importance of the 5 rights. The 5 rights are right drug, dose, patient, route and time of which can be easily neglected due
The Role of a Pharmacist is often underestimated to only being a pill dispenser or drug interaction expert. Yet there is so much more to the Role of a Pharmacist. Pharmacists are advocates for patient’s safety, health and efficacy. Their job is to ensure that people live more comfortable, easy, and well managed lives by making sure their medications are accurate and in the patient’s best health interest. Preventing medication error is one of the essential keys to saving lives and being a Pharmacist Medication errors are often classified into different types of categories to assist with medication reporting and determining the root cause of an error to take steps toward future error prevention.
Prevention of medication errors is an ongoing initiative in the field of nursing. Medication errors jeopardize a patient’s safety, which results in vast costs to correct the effects of the error and it could potentially prevent the reimbursement from insurance companies to the hospital. Often times the nurse is the only person to catch an error with a written prescription or the incorrect dose sent to the nursing unit from the pharmacy. As a result, it is usually the nurse’s responsibility to speak up when an error is identified rather than administering a medication due to the mere fact that an order was written by the physician. While there are many medication errors which occur in the hospital setting, most of those errors, however occur after a patient has been discharged to home (“Severe Harm and Death,” 2016).
Medication errors are “the most common single preventable cause of adverse events in medical practice” [1]. According to the Institute Of Medicine report (IOM, 1999 ), as high as 98,000 patients die in hospitals each year as a result of preventable medical errors [2] which makes medical errors the second leading cause of death in US. . The report further estimates that, medical errors cost the nation approximately $37.6 Billion each year; about $17 billion of those costs are associated with preventable errors. Medication incidents are commonplace in healthcare [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. In Australian study, out of over 14,000 admission records reviewed, 16.6% of admissions were associated with an "adverse event",[6].